This workshop invites participants to explore their relationship to text and imagery as a uniquely poetic union in creative practices. Lan "Florence" Yee is an interdisciplinary artist who collects text in underappreciated places and ferments it until it is too suspicious to ignore. As seemingly mundane images and words flood our everyday lives (through signage, templates, media, and more), artists can parse out their deeply affective nature by taking away the veneer of neutrality. Text and imagery function as mutual interventions into each other's spheres of influence.
Participants are asked to bring both text (eg. notes, lists, signs, conversations stuck in your head, etc.) and images that may be significant or yet-to-be fully known to you (eg. camera roll photos, discarded photos, newspaper clippings, archival fragments, etc.). This workshop will be partially presentation-based to introduce various artists' use of text with imagery, and then transition into creative prompts to respond to your objects. After several rounds of interventions, we will gather to share our creations.
Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto & Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They co-founded the Institute of Institutional Critique with Mattia Zylak in 2019 and the Chinatown Biennial with Arezu Salamzadeh in 2020. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists (2023).
